Meet the Editors

Publisher and Executive Editor Philip K. Jason is the author or editor of several books. From 1973 to 2001, he taught English and Creative Writing at United States Naval Academy. Allen Mendenhall is a writer, attorney, and educator. He has taught in a university, a law school, a penitentiary, and a Japanese private school. RIGHT: Photographs by VanessaK Photography, LLC.

The Southern Literary Review celebrates southern authors and their contributions to American literature. We feature the classic writers who have defined southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors through interviews, profiles, and book reviews. In an effort to back independent bookstores and to encourage creativity in the publishing world, SLR is an IndieBound supporter.

Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The “Etowah” in the title to Raymond L. Atkins’s recently published book refers to a 164-mile-long waterway rising in northwest Georgia to begin flowing south and then west through Rome, Georgia. If one had the interest, one might build a raft and, Huckleberry-like, float along through Alabama down to Mobile […]

APM: Congratulations on your debut novel, The Last Road Home. What’s this book about? DJ: The book is about discovery. Two kids, Junebug who is a white orphaned farm boy, and Fancy who is the daughter of black sharecroppers, meet and form a bond at the age of eight. They spend their growing-up years discovering […]

Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl There’s an online collection now providing access to over 7,000 different photographic views and portraits made during the American Civil War. The images represent the original glass plate negatives photographed under the supervision of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. The images are powerful: the dead about to be interred at […]

Reviewed by Donna Meredith The land itself and male characters dominate the early works of West Virginia author Matthew Neill Null. They include the literary novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books, 2015) and a short story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande Books, 2016), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. If there is […]

Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall With so many journals and genres available today, the dependable reviewer has a duty to warn off the noble optimists and advise the faint-hearted when a book is not for them. Obligation thus requires that I caution readers: Gilbert Allen’s The Final Days of Great American Shopping, a collection of short […]

AM: Julia, it’s great to have the opportunity to promote a regular contributor to Southern Literary Review. Tell us a little about your new collection of essays, A Place That Was Home. JND: Thank you, Allen. I appreciate your introducing my new book to your readers. A Place That Was Home is my first nonfiction […]

Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It could become a film noir but the script would need to be a departure from the novel, remade into a much tauter, no-nonsense rapid-fire dialogue between characters resplendent in their gritty glory. It would help to have hardboiled masters at hand like Raymond Chandler and tough guys like Bogart […]

Reviewed by William Bernhardt Though many contemporary poets pen wonderful work, this is not an age characterized by innovation. The free verse/blank verse modern poem looks much the same from one page to the next. Consequently, when a couple of artists jointly produce something genuinely innovative, we should all sit up and notice. This is just […]